Asian countries and cities such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea currently faces an acute housing shortage. Low income families and persons wait for a long time to obtain a public housing flat and thus
live in dismal and inadequate housing conditions. They are excluded and thus live in a subdivided flat or cabin unit which is small and fails to meet building standards and there is also serious labelled issues.
With reference to European experience, a special category of social housing is advocated and developed in order to improve the living standards of grassroots’ families and persons.
In Hong Kong, some transitional social housing experiments are developed by social welfare organizations and social enterprises in recent years in order to establish a third way of affordable housing, on top of public housing. It is emphasized by social welfare organizations that this type of transitional social housing has strong social service components in the sense to develop a small community of residents, for example, one project emphasizes youth-led community building and “House Captain” system to develop mutual help support network across buildings and floors.
On top of that, Taiwan attempts to urge the government to produce social housing in multiple approaches. Government plans to encourage multiple home-owners to rent out their empty houses by incentives, such as tax or funding. This project wishes to have 80,000 units till 2024.
On the other hand, Korea has rapidly expanded public housing body since the 1980s, but the stock is still insufficient and there is serious stigma problem. As a result, public and private sectors cooperate each other to build pioneer social housing in Korea.